How To Solve Smart City Challenges

What is a smart city?

A smart city is an urban area using advanced electronic methods to collect data, to improve the operations and safety of its inhabitants. Smart cities are not necessarily the biggest metropoles in the world, but the ones that use technology, to improve their effectiveness and existence.

The 4th Industrial Revolution (Industry 4.0) was first introduced by Klaus Schwab in 2015 and now it is paving the way for the development of Smart Cities.

We are talking about a smart city when advanced urban infrastructures use data to increase the living experience for the citizens

You might have heard about smart buildings or grocery-ordering refrigerators, where gaining data from an individual's routine and robotizing their daily tasks allow them a more cost and time-efficient way of living.

However, the new generation of the Internet of Things (IoT) in the automation industry is taking urban services to an entirely new level.

As some experts have explained, "smart cities are regular cities on testosterone". Smart cities have the amazing infrastructure and rapid growth.

The greatest challenge of emergency services is that accidents or disasters cannot be predicted and the safety of citizens, who ultimately use the city, highly depends on the response of the emergency sector. A delay in response times could be the difference between life and death.

While manpower deployed during emergencies can be trained, they must be provided with proper information and vital equipment in time to give a head start in cutting response time.

That is why it is important to raise initiatives, which provide reliable information on dispatch supplies on board emergency vehicles. This ensures the quick and smooth functioning of emergency services.

What is AutoPi and How it is connected to the Smart City?

The AutoPi TMU device delivers innovative connected car services to enhance and reimagine the driving experience for citizens. AutoPi is working on solutions to make a digital transformation in the automotive industry and build a foundation for human-centric mobility services.

AutoPi is specializing in IoT hardware devices and extendable cloud platform to securely connect vehicles to the internet and gain data on automotive usage which provide a cheaper, safer, and smoother way of driving for its users.

Even though the widespread adoption of IoT technology is still facing some challenges, besides the automotive industry, connected devices and healthcare is also one of the fastest-growing sectors in the automation industry.

It is not that far away when AutoPi solutions will be able to unite all these sectors and enhance a better quality of life for citizens. The advanced AutoPi IoT platform will benefit lots of sectors.

Therefore we have decided to put together a series of articles to allow you to gain valuable insights and help you stay tuned with the latest updates on smart city mobility solutions.

Road Condition Detection

Poorly maintained road surfaces are very harmful to vehicles but they are also limiting the safe, secure, and reliable transportation of people, goods, and services in urban areas.

Bad road conditions like potholes or layers of ice on the road provide unsecure transportation and favor the poor growth of the economy.

Good road conditions allow commuters fast and smooth movement and transit goods and services from the manufacturers to the consumers that cherish the development of the economy.

That is why it is important to detect and maintain road conditions in the early stage and provide safe and reliable road networks.

"Did you know that a recent study of The Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation> estimates that road problems like potholes and iced-over stretches of highway cause more than 42,000 deaths a year in the US?>”

Maintenance of roads is typically handled by the public road service. Detection of conditions relies on manual inspection and reporting, sometimes by the users of the roads.

The process is tedious, cumbersome, and prone to errors and mistakes. With an automatic system including full reporting, this process could be highly improved while at the same time reducing the costs of road maintenance.

Using AutoPi for Road Surface Detection

Current road maintenance depends on manual detection and reporting, often visual. AutoPi has built-in sensors with capabilities to collect and process data about the environments, which solves the problem of having a reliable and up-to-date data foundation for making valid decisions about road surface conditions.

There is a built-in accelerometer in AutoPi that detects every movement of the device and shows if the device was moved, because of a pothole or bad road surface.

Additional sensors can be added to the AutoPi with ease. The AutoPi has a built-in BLE connection, which makes it possible to connect to various other sensors. One such is the Texas Instruments CC2650 SensorTag, which has a built-in accelerometer.

The TI-Sensortag connects to the AutoPi device via Bluetooth. Placing additional sensors on various places in the car can give a detailed overview of how the road surface is. With the AutoPi connected to the Cloud Management Platform, data can be uploaded to any location for analysis.

With a solid data foundation, an analysis of the road surface condition can be performed, via pattern detection. The AutoPi also relays GPS position, so with all the data collected by the AutoPi and the external sensors, it would be possible to create a report showing exactly where and how severe a pothole was.

Even though, AutoPi serves the driver in the first place, not only citizens can benefit from the collected data. In the future, AutoPi could automatically send this information to governmental institutions to speed up their reaction time, optimize their resources,         and lower accident rates.

Overall, AutoPi is designed as a collaborative digital platform to allow governments, businesses, and citizens to take initiative in the shaping the future of Smart Cities.

It is a human-centric approach for collaborating and co-creating solutions with the citizens, so the real potential of AutoPi is with the true innovators.

Using AutoPi for Asset Tracking Solution

Among all branches, fire, rescue, and healthcare services show the highest interest in the adoption of Asset Tracking Solutions, mostly because these sectors experience losses due to missing equipment and also well-planned and effective operations in these fields are much required.

AutoPi Asset Tracking Solution proposes immediate and sustainable assistance, where vehicles can cater to significant tasks to make rescue and emergency operations safer, easier, and more efficient.

In our case, ultra-low powered sensors should be attached and assigned to every vial of equipment in each vehicle. This will give a detailed overview of the location and the temperature of the asset, or even measure the humidity.

Sensor tags will connect to the AutoPi Telematics Unit via Bluetooth and automatically report position details to monitor if the registered fixed assets are nearby.

It can also raise alerts if the device is not detected or show the last seen position of the asset, so quick actions can be performed. With AutoPi connected to the cloud, data can be uploaded. With AutoPi connected to the cloud, data can be uploaded and shared with external parties for further analysis.

AutoPi is designed as a collaborative digital platform and a highly customizable solution. The scope is to help governments, businesses, and citizens by creating relevant and useful data that all can benefit from.

Do you have a vision for a new project?

We would love to hear about that, get in touch with us.